Unity of Command Black Turn DLC Out December 10th

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Unity of Command is a historical, turn-based strategy game set on the Eastern Front of World War 2. Wait! Come back. It’s also accessible, setting your tank-commanding tactics and supply line-supporting strategies upon a clean, communicative map and making the hows and whys of your decisions as obvious as possible. Kieron liked it. Jim liked it. Adam liked it. John probably still hated it.

So that’s about a thousand reasons to be excited that it’s getting a second piece of DLC, called Black Turn, which lets you command your armies through Operation Barbarossa.

In a post on the official site, we find out salient details: it’s out on December 10th. It’s longer than the original Stalingrad campaign. It’s historically accurate up until the German assault on Moscow, at which point you can win and play two ‘what-if’ scenarios. That final historical fight for Moscow “is an 18-turn, 200-unit behemoth that is rated ‘hard’ to boot.”

The thing I should say is that “accessible” doesn’t mean “easy”. Even Unity of Command’s easier missions ought to be rated ‘hard’, as its AI mercilessly poked holes in your front lines, leaving your men stranded without winter coats or warm soup. You wouldn’t want it any other way. What made it beautiful and rare was that you could come at it as a rookie, poke at its muted colours, and come to understand how it worked even as you failed another mission.

I haven’t really got into the campaign. I’ve mainly played the scenarios, which allow you to fuck up and try again if you fail. The key is keeping your supply lines open and using your tanks to do the heavy smashing, although obviously that’s easier said than done when that one motorised infantry unit you left alone zips behind your lines and cuts the supply to your main attack force. The main thing about this game is completing your objectives in time – often you’ll win anyway, but a brilliant victory involves seeing the gaps in the enemy defences and mercilessly pounding them. Sometimes it feels too much like puzzle solving, finding the approach that the designers intended, but you still feel jolly smart when you bash aside the enemy without breaking a sweat.

I like the feel of the game, but getting top tier victory often requires too much luck (didn’t get that 80% overrun roll, sorry restart and try again) and gamey tactics (okay boys, we are going to charge, hit the enemy and then disband! Why? Because the tanks rolling up behind us aren’t going to be able to get a 90% chance to overrun unless we weaken them first, and we can move off the line fast enough).

Yes, it’s highly annoying when you attack a unit and it doesn’t quite break, so your tanks are sitting there holding their dicks for a turn unless you disband because none of your frontline units have any action or movement points left.

It is brutally hard. I’ve been in situations where I’m pretty sure I’ve got the enemy pinned and surrounded and I’m mopping up and then they’ll slip out and start to wreck things. You can’t give them an inch.

I would say …kinda. You’re never really “building” units in any fashion, and much of the game is about holding a strong line in order to keep up your supplies, while trying to punch through with tanks and such. Losing a supply line is devastating and can take a scenario from what you thought was a sure win, to a miserable loss in a few turns. Supply and deployment is a little more gamey in Advance Wars, and here it’s a brutal (yet fair) game mechanic.

I would also add, the enemy is content to just let you sit there and never forces a fight it doesn’t need to. It requires you to be proactive, and to consider which risks you can afford to take, and which risks you need to take.

As a Wargamer I wasn’t to keen on Unity of Command. A little to abstract for my liking..I preferred decisive Campaigns: Case Blue..which along with WW1Gold are the only Wargames above Coy scale I’ve ever truly enjoyed and found immersive.

This game would be great, BUT there is on thing destroying immersion: you can’t take any unit from one map to another. how can you call your game “startegy” when it doesn’t really matter how players achive victory? “strategy” is when you take care of your troops, you are trying to save as many as you can, because they will be reused in future battles. in UoC you just throw meat vs another meat, let them die as soon as they achive your goals…

I suppose it’s because the levels would be hard to balance if you arrived with three infantry units and a badly damaged tank and had to take Berlin, but you’re right that it would be nice to have a more open-ended campaign where you didn’t have to take every objective with clockwork precision and could conserve your forces a bit more to fight another day.